Surgical Strikeout

Steven Soderbergh’s disappointing “The Knick.”

“The Knick” makes you appreciate other historical dramas, like “Masters of Sex.”

Photograph by Mary Cybulski/Cinemax.

Steven Soderbergh’s “Behind the Candelabra” (2013), for HBO, was a spectacular with a shrewd heart. In the two-hour movie, Soderbergh placed two superb performances, by Michael Douglas (as Liberace) and Matt Damon (as his lover, Scott), inside a jewel-box mansion, which he filmed as both a prison and a castle. Set in the Hollywood of the late seventies and early eighties, the movie admirably resisted bio-pic sentimentality, dwelling comfortably within the contradictions of that closeted era, never telling the audience quite how to respond to this exploitative but genuine marriage. Like many director-driven TV shows of the past few years, “Behind the Candelabra” offered a fresh model for television, in which audacious visuals are as central to storytelling as great writing is.

In recent interviews, Soderbergh has seemed disenchanted by movies, financially and culturally: TV audiences, he has argued, are more open to character complexity, to ambiguity and risk-taking. It’s all the more disappointing, then, to report that Soderbergh’s first post-“Candelabra” TV venture, the period hospital drama “The Knick,” colors inside the lines. Rather than innovate, the series, on Cinemax, leans hard on cable drama’s hoariest (and whoriest) antiheroic formulas, diluting potentially powerful themes. Set in New York at the turn of the twentieth century, “The Knick,” which was written by Jack Amiel and Michael Begler, is about the Knickerbocker, a hospital that treats the city’s poorest immigrants, with a board of directors made up of wealthy philanthropists. At the Knick, a brilliant, drug-addicted, brothel-frequenting doctor—John Thackery, played by a beetle-browed Clive Owen—is poised to push modern medicine forward, from C-sections to skin grafts. The surgical-history material is rich stuff, but the series itself is dour and hokey, full of stock characters and eye-rolling exposition. Designed to flatter rather than to challenge the viewer, it’s proof that even an ambitious director can’t overcome a blinkered script.

The series opens with a dazzling sequence of obstetric surgery gone horribly wrong, in front of an auditorium of onlookers—a vision plucked straight out of Thomas Eakins’s “The Agnew Clinic.” White men in wool suits gaze down in judgment, while nurses, who wear tiny crested hats, like paper frites cones, stand by, stiff as soldiers. Soon, blood fills every jar, and chaos takes over, seeping into the clean place where the surgeons hoped to bring pure reason. This horrific set piece, and the grim scenes that follow, promise something powerful: a meditation on the stop-and-start nature of surgical innovation, one grounded in the economic and racial fractures of the era. Instead, the first seven episodes devolve into something far simpler: a Great Man tale, studded with lurid thrills. Like “Boardwalk Empire” and its ilk, “The Knick” is studiously harsh, visually and thematically—the well-done and gory surgical reënactments substitute for mobster violence. It’s a historical reconstruction, although not always a careful one: at one point, a character refers to men “running trains” on a prostitute, an idiom that didn’t appear until mid-century. Often, the series feels reverse-engineered from network history, a fancied-up variation on “St. Elsewhere” or “House,” its familiar story beats disguised by propulsive editing and elegant long shots. The British show “Luther” does something similar, wrapping a crime procedural in a well-made suit and a serious scowl, earning credit for greater originality than it possesses.

Thackery himself is a by now familiar figure. He is a rebel, a loner, a genius with a bad temper; he’s also a junkie, who hangs out in exotic opium salons, where he is catered to by Oriental prostitutes—that seems like the right adjective, given the way that these scenes are filmed, with silent beauties offering up their breasts like kumquats. Thackery attracts the ladies at the hospital, too, including a bicycle-riding West Virginian nurse who moons after him (the raw-faced Eve Hewson, giving a subtle, watchable performance). When an ex shows up on his doorstep, wracked by syphilis, Thackery is unfazed. “No one handles the unexpected like John Thackery,” she says. “It’s where I live,” he replies. As Liz Lemon might put it: opposite.

In the show’s major departure from formula, Thackery is also a racist, in a way that’s logical for the period. He scorns and rejects Dr. Algernon Edwards, the “Negro” doctor with whom he’s forced to work, because the hospital benefactor’s liberal white daughter (Juliet Rylance), who grew up with Edwards—he’s the son of her cook and her chauffeur—insists that he be on staff. But we can tell, right off, where this story must go: you can’t have two medical geniuses without game eventually recognizing game. Andre Holland brings considerable charisma to the role of the soft-voiced, steely-spined Edwards, but the character is a dignified contrivance, a model minority who is all decency, without edges or idiosyncrasies. In his basement office, he sets up a secret clinic for African-American patients, where he spearheads new surgical techniques. In his run-down boarding house, he’s threatened by a ruffian, who says, on cue, “You think you’re better than me?” Edwards—in a surprise that is no surprise—knocks out his assailant, demonstrating his virility.

Meanwhile, every other black character is made of particleboard: worthy victims, poor workingmen, proud mothers. The same is true of many of the other picturesque immigrant patients, glimpsed in squalid tenements or dying in the ward. When a violently racist Irish mother shows up, in a late episode, it’s exciting, because she feels so organically hateful. There’s a “You must pay the rent!” bluntness to the show’s politics: rich men say stuffy things, corrupt men say pervy things, gangsters say “dese” and “dose,” a crass health inspector slurps his coffee. When two wealthy families are infected with typhoid fever, a prim matron asks, “Do you know if they’ve been spending any time with immigrants? They carry it, you know.” Her modern daughter replies, “Oh, for God’s sake, Mother.” Her father sighs and says, “Let’s just hope this isn’t the beginning of an epidemic.” The best bits—a race riot, an unsettling series of C-sections—never gain traction, since the larger arcs veer, maddeningly, toward progressive wish-fulfillment: the essentially decent people (sexy, iconoclastic freethinkers) must eventually unite against the jerks (thugs, prigs, snobs, bigots).

It’s enough to make you re-appreciate the boldness of other historical dramas, which have lent such variety to TV. “Mad Men,” that sly opiate dreamscape, is unpredictable to a fault—who could have imagined that a lawnmower would run over a British foot? Peggy Olson has never been a mere chin-up proto-feminist; instead, she’s a lovable, exasperating freak, capable of pettiness as well as gumption. There’s also the satisfying BBC series “Call the Midwife,” set among nuns and midwives in London in the nineteen-fifties. At first sight, it’s more formulaic than “The Knick”: it’s a straight-up procedural, like “Grey’s Anatomy.” But “Call the Midwife” has become richer, more variable, and more ambitious with every season, exploring, like “The Knick,” themes about obstetrics and class politics yet painting far warmer, less generic portraits of the midwives’ slum-dwelling clients.

Best of all is “Masters of Sex,” another quasi-historical show that portrays a brilliant, prickly ob-gyn—but one whom the show isn’t dedicated to glamorizing. The series sets itself a near-impossible task: to make viewers care about the bond between two sex researchers, the icy William Masters and the warm Virginia Johnson, whose odd affair is, like the one in “Behind the Candelabra,” at once a cynical bargain, a bold experiment in intimacy, a future marriage, and a tragedy in the making. Amazingly, in the show’s superior second season, it pulls this off. The structurally experimental third episode focusses on one interaction between the couple—an erotic role-play—intercut with both a prizefight and a story about an intersex infant whose father insists the child be surgically made female. Skillfully directed by Michael Apted and written by Amy Lippman, the story raises questions about rage and masculinity, sex and power, but doesn’t resolve them. Instead, it finds theatre in the uneasy, irrational, libidinal swing of human spontaneity. Like the best historical dramas, it does something better than deliver the facts: it expands the boundaries of what’s possible. ♦